When You Want to Punch Your Boss in the Face
We’ve all been there. I’m sure most of us have never acted on it, but we’ve all had the thought.
Some of the best moments of leadership growth for me have come when I either got off the phone or headed to a break at a meeting so irritated and angry that I really would have liked to punch my boss in the face.
It’s a great thing when you agree and align with the objective. You can unleash your passion and tap into your creative energy without any hesitation. Becoming the message is easy. Your team rallies behind you and starts running alongside you and obstacles fall one after another. Those are great moments.
While great, those times often don’t challenge and develop your critical thinking, resource management, and skills of influence like the times described by the title of this article. Influencing up is always more of a challenge than influencing sideways or down.
The most important skill in these moments is the ability to PAUSE.
“Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.”
Viktor E. Frankl
In that PAUSE, or as Viktor Frankl puts it, that ‘space’, there are a few questions that you need to consider in order to best move forward.
Where is your boss’s motivation coming from?
maybe there’s an end-game in sight that you don’t see
everyone has a boss or a board or shareholders to report to
Could there be a bottom-line goal with a timeline that you are unaware of?
despite the disagreement, perhaps there is a financial end-game that is crucial to the business
you may not get a fully disclosed answer, but why not ask?
Look in the mirror.
is the cause of the frustration merely a matter of style?
if this is a regular feeling, what have YOU not expressed or shared in the past?
When I have found myself in this place, I have usually come to the conclusion that the person I am actually frustrated with is… myself. If that’s the conclusion - YOU own that.
It’s ok to disagree, and disagreeing well is key to any healthy work environment. If the culture you are in doesn’t normally disagree in a healthy & beneficial way - THEN LEAD THE WAY and DO IT.